Mission Essential

The T2, godfather of the modern oil supertanker

Feature Article from Hemmings Motor News

Almost before the United States was pulled into World War II and the first shells were still landing, it was already obvious that to win, the Allies would need mobile armed forces of unprecedented magnitude, positioned to shove the aggressors back within their own borders. That would mean trucks and tanks reaching to the horizon, all greedy for fuel. Keeping them going dictated the creation of the oceangoing bulk petroleum tanker, including the T2, a blueprint for most oil-carrying vessels that have evolved ever since.
Powered tankers capable of carrying petroleum products in bulk (as opposed to the earlier practice of hauling individual barrels) date back to the 1880s. The biggest obstacle to their development was improving stability en route, achieved by dividing the hull into separate cargo tankers, with a lesser issue being the isolation of their engines from highly explosive cargo vapors. The business model for transoceanic oil transport came from Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, even after its antitrust breakup by the federal government, which was pumping crude from places such as briefly independent Azerbaijan and Venezuela even during the 1920s Texas drilling boom.
The first T2 tankers of the acclaimed design actually predated Pearl Harbor, launched in 1940 by Sun Shipbuilding in Baltimore. They measured out to 501 feet, with a 68-foot beam, 21,000-ton displacement, with steam-turbine power. A follow-on model, the T2-SE-A1, was the most numerous of the series, stretched to 526 feet, with a capacity of 118,000 barrels--today's largest supertankers can transport more than 3.1 million barrels. The war effort saw more than 500 assembled to specification through 1945, welded together by Sun, Kaiser, and Marinship, a division of the Bechtel construction titan based in Sausalito, California. That same strategy, build utilitarian merchant ships in a rush at low cost, gave rise to the freighter known as the Liberty ship, to which the T2 is most often compared by maritime historians.
One of them is Captain Walter W. Jaffee, a former skipper and professor from El Cerrito, California, who now operates The Glencannon Press (www.glencannon.com), specializing in books on merchant-shipping history. "The T2, like the Liberty ship, was kept fairly simple and inexpensive," he explained. "It helped to satisfy the demand for crude oil that was developing along both U.S. coasts during the war."
As the world crawled out of its rubble, many of the T2s assumed an expanded role, literally, in petroleum transportation. Growing demand in reindustrialized nations intensified their thirst for oil. Jaffee, author of The Tankers from A (A.W. Peake) to Z (Zephyrhills), told us what subsequently took place: "Starting in the 1950s, and continuing into the 1960s, a lot of the T2s were 'jumbo-ized,' as the industry called it. Their hulls were cut, and mid-bodies welded in to stretch them. They would carry as much as half again as much crude, with no corresponding increase in power required."
Some of the T2s were converted into very early prototypes of container ships, primarily by SeaTrain.

This article originally appeared in the January, 2009 issue of Hemmings Motor News.